The Not-So-Great Litany: Lord have mercy, indeed (e.g., using a foot wedge in golf?).
Meet The Biden Admistration’s New Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition.
Here is our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition after slipping into something more comfortable.
Just when one thinks the Biden Administration has hit rock bottom (if you’ll pardon the expression) with its hires, they let gravity do its thing and sink even lower.
Twitter in 1775.
Ever protecting us from misinformation.
Yes, Yes, Go for It!
For once, Democrats and Republicans stand together.
Music for the Fourth.
Music for America by an American.
On this Independence Day it is a good thing to celebrate with music as well as fireworks. Since compositions by American greats like Sousa and Gershwin are well represented (perhaps overly so) on this day, your Tatler will instead post a couple of links to compositions by another American great, Charles Ives.
Ives’s compositions were all but ignored most his career. His “daytime job” was insurance, in which he was a pioneer. Among other innovations he was the inventor of what we now call “estate planning.” Ives made scads of money in this line, but it wasn’t until the end of his life he began to receive recognition for his music, most significantly from Leonard Bernstein, who programed one of his symphonies for a New York Philharmonic concert.
Link one is to the third movement of Ives’s Holliday Symphony: The Fourth of July. This is truly difficult music, to listen to and to play (note that two conductors are used in this performance). Nevertheless, the work is also tremendous good fun, chock full of quotes of American tunes, mostly patriotic ones. For example, listen for the tuba early into the piece playing Columbia the Gem of the Ocean (a favorite of Ives), softly and slow. Listeners will may glean from this piece understanding why turn-of-the-last-century audiences had a bit of difficulty with Ives’s music.
Link two isn’t difficult at all in the listening, just fun. It is however, like the last piece, difficult to play:Variations on ‘America‘ (My Country ’tis of Thee) for organ, composed when Ives was but 17 years old and already a virtuoso on that instrument. Watch the organist’s feet (appropriately adorned) flying about the pedalboard toward the end.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
July 4, 2022.
All is not lost.
The past few years have been brutal to the United States. The radical left’s long march through the institutions is now effectively complete. Starting with the government, leftists have moved through corporations, education, medicine, science, arts and God knows what else, with most of their targets cravenly capitulating to wokeness. At the left’s behest those institutions now busy themselves undoing things that once made this country a beacon to the rest of the world. These days it is understandable to gloomily perceive the United States as a giant deteriorating socialist mediocrity, no longer respected–indeed ridiculed–while a resigned populace stands by helpless.
Or so it would seem. This writer is grateful to the estimable and veteran blogger Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, for posting this Independence Day a link to a superb piece in Sean Dietrich’s blog Sean of the South, which is simply entitled Mendon, Missouri. That tiny locale is where last week an Amtrak train running at 87 mph slammed into a massive dump truck inexplicably parked at a crossing, with catastrophic results. Dietrich describes nicely two reactions that took place following the accident, the first one seeming all-too-typical to most Americans.
Reporters from national newspapers visited. They photographed, videoed and wrote. Cable news anchors wore frowny faces and mentioned the wreck, just before cutting to commercials urging elderly viewers to reverse mortgage their livers.
The second reaction was mostly ignored by our media, which typically declines reporting on Americans acting contrary to received opinion.
Throngs of ordinary townspeople arrived before first responders even knew about the crash. There were volunteers crawling out of the wallpaper.
“It was a wonderful problem to have,” said school district superintendent, Eric Hoyt, “but we probably had too many volunteers show up.”
People came from all over Chariton County, riding beat-up Silverados, ATVs or arriving on foot. They came from Sumner, Marceline, Cunningham, Brookfield and Indian Grove.
Two Boy Scout troops dutifully helped injured victims from the wreckage. Local high-schoolers were fashioning bandages out of bandannas. Old women recited the Lord’s Prayer alongside strangers in blood-stained clothes.
There were farmers, off-duty nurses, truck drivers, soccer moms, Little League coaches and grade-schoolers. They were doling out food, first aid, bottled water and, most importantly, phone chargers.
Victims were taken to local homes, fed, bathed and bandaged. Weeping passengers were embraced by rural preachers. Passengers using wheelchairs were lifted from the rubble by young men in ropers and camouflage caps.
Local schoolbus drivers transported the wounded to hospitals. Northwestern High School staff members triaged victims in the gymnasium and fed people in the cafeteria.
One resident said that Mendon didn’t feel like a 171-person town anymore. “It was like 671 people came together.”
And the most unusual thing about all this is: None of this is unusual. At least not within the national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town.
That, dear readers, is one of the “glimmers of hope” your Tatler wrote of in an earlier post concerning our dark times, ordinary Americans. Not only do they thrive, by definition they vastly outnumber the so-called elites who paradoxically insist their cynicism and anger is the prevailing mood of the land.
It isn’t. It is however up to ordinary Americans to rise up, collectively cry “enough!” and consign the scheming and hateful anti-American elites to oblivion, which being so outnumbered ought not prove too arduous. The next step is taking back our country so “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Noted with Pleasure: Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess.
Sharing a classic with a young pastor.
Once of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest pictures, I Confess concerns a priest who hears the confession of a man who has committed murder. Later, the priest learns to his horror the same man is implicating him for it. Taking advantage of the confessional seal he has set the priest up. Since the Catholic Church forbids breaking the confessional seal for any reason whatsoever, Robert Montgomery’s priest finds himself in a perilous situation. Even if convicted and sentenced to be hanged, he cannot divulge what he heard in the box. The picture concludes with a particularly moving scene where the killer, mortally wounded, asks the priest he wronged for his forgiveness and receives it.
Beautifully and dramatically shot by Robert Burks on location in Quebec City in the early ’50s, much of it in the grand and historic Hotel Frontenac (where this writer once spent a few comfortable days), I Confess is not only a thriller of the first rank, but also a treat for the eyes, as well the ears with its superb score by veteran composer Dimitri Tiomkin.
Your Tatler, having seen the picture before, watched it again a few evenings ago with his present pastor, who had not seen it. Not only did that priest enjoy it thoroughly, during the screening he made some enlightening observations concerning what Robert Montgomery’s priest character was or was not permitted to do while in his dire predicament.
***
Watching I Confess again summoned up memory of a sermon your Tatler heard many years ago at his parish church in New York. The pastor told of being fresh out of seminary in the ’70s and being assigned to a parish in the roughest part of the South Bronx. In those days that part of the City was in a state of collapse (rather like what’s happening now in the City), beset with horrendous crimes along with rampant and unchecked gang warfare.
Our pastor told of hearing one of his first ever confessions, that of a gang member who confessed he had just committed two murders. He then asked the perhaps shaken young priest for absolution and penance, which, after making his Act of Contrition, he received. The gang member never returned to the church and our pastor never learned his eventual fate, good or bad. Decades later, he pointed out to his enthralled listeners in the pews that gang member would not go to hell for the two murders confessed to. He might go to hell for other crimes not confessed, but not those two murders.
Hearing that sermon not long after being received into the Holy Catholic Church was forceful manifestation to this writer of the gift of God which is the sacrament of Holy Confession.
A Taos Scene.
Taking the form of a one-act play.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
TAOS TATLER
WOMAN SHOPPER
Setting: Smith’s Supermarket condiments aisle.
TATLER, walking by WOMAN SHOPPER in motorized shopping cart. Stops after noting harried look on her face.
TAOS TATLER
May I help you?
WOMAN SHOPPER
Not unless you have a ticket to paradise.
TAOS TATLER (Struggling, trying to come up with equally snappy response.)
Actually, I do, but don’t like to proselytize.
WOMAN SHOPPER (Laughing.)
No, I don’t need any help, but thank you anyway.
Curtain
The Whitewashing of America Continues.
Cornell removes from public display a bust of Lincoln and a bronzed plaque of the Gettysburg Address.
“Someone complained, and it was gone.”
That’s all Cornell University biology Professor Randy Wayne said he has been able to determine so far about the whereabouts of a longtime display in the Ivy League school’s Kroch Library of a bust of President Abraham Lincoln in front of a bronzed Gettysburg Address plaque.
Your Tatler wonders if a point will be reached when the masses rise up and stop this frightening eradication of our nation’s history, or if we are we truly doomed to the dystopian socialist future posited by Orwell 73 years ago. Every now and then there are hopeful signs, a glimmer of hope, we have reached that point (e.g., the recent Supreme Court decisions), but after a few days the long march through the institutions continues, scarcely affected. It is as if those signs and glimmers are merely insignificant bumps on the road, easily managed and not slowing down in the slightest our journey on the Road to Serfdom.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered…History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right”
Lysistrata Redux.
Rediscovering the oldest, most reliable and safest mode of birth control.
And now, women are being called to withhold sex from men ‘until abortion rights are federal law’ as calls for a nationwide sex strike also gain momentum on social media.
‘Women of America: Take the pledge. Because SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, we cannot take the risk of an unintended pregnancy, therefore, we will not have sex with any man — including our husbands — unless we are trying to become pregnant,’ one Twitter user wrote.
Unlike the gals in Aristophanes’s masterpiece, the women protesting the overturning of Roe v. Wade by withholding sexual favors are likely to enjoy a lifetime of blessed chastity.
THE TAOS TATLER. 
